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Open the email group #37

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jni opened this issue Aug 15, 2018 · 20 comments
Closed

Open the email group #37

jni opened this issue Aug 15, 2018 · 20 comments

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@jni
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jni commented Aug 15, 2018

Do we really want the email group to be invite-only? It was off-putting to me, at least.

In other news, my community (image analysis) has recently adopted a unified Discourse forum, which I would consider a fantastic, more full-feature option for this group. See example here:

https://forum.image.sc/

Here is a discussion about how to run discourse as both an online forum and a mailing list:

https://forum.image.sc/t/formal-policy-for-project-to-be-a-software-partner/18834/14

A specific advantage over Google Groups is the use of tags, so that users can subscribe only to specific topics. It's also fully open source so it can be run on our own hardware.
@jni
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jni commented Aug 15, 2018

(or NeCTAR instance)

@manodeep
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@jni Thanks for your comment. You should be able to request to join the googlegroup - did that not work for you?

Or are you saying that the googlegroup should be open and anyone should automatically be able to sign up?

(We have previously had the googlegroup as hidden and invite-only but that is no longer the case; or at least shouldn't be)

@jni
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jni commented Aug 15, 2018

Yes, I was saying that requesting access was one step too many. ;) (And yes, I have requested it.) imho you should have to register (to prevent spam), but reading should be open. But maybe I’m missing important reasons for secrecy. =)

@manodeep
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Ahh I see what you mean. We are committed towards transparency and open-ness within the community, and that should extend to (at least reading) the exchanges on the mailing list. I will table an agenda item for the next Steering Committee meeting (in two weeks) #38

That example forum/mailing list looks slick -- are you willing/able to set one up for RSEs, if we wanted to go that route?

@jni
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jni commented Aug 16, 2018

I have never set up a discourse instance but I am willing to try. =)

@rowlandm
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rowlandm commented Aug 16, 2018 via email

@jni
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jni commented Aug 16, 2018

Gitter is more difficult to search / navigate later.

@atruskie
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IMO I find both slack and gitter offputting as they benefit from real-time interaction - as IM tools they do this well. Discourse and Google groups match the asynchronicity I'd want to have in this community and they also provide searchable history.

I haven't set up discourse either, but I want to give it a go. My own project is considering setting up a discourse instance.

@rowlandm
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rowlandm commented Aug 16, 2018 via email

@jni
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jni commented Aug 16, 2018

@rowlandm that's the easiest, but discourse has benefits above and beyond this:

(1) It's FOSS and controlled by us. I've been bitten enough times by Google (Reader, Notebook, Timeful, and to a lesser extent, Wave) that I dislike relying on their infrastructure. Groups in particular has been neglected for long enough that I am not super-optimistic about its future.
(2) It's prettier. ;)
(3) It has more mod-cons such as tagging and pings for users, which means subscribers can easily customise their notifications and interactions.

@rowlandm
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rowlandm commented Aug 16, 2018 via email

@goldingn
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goldingn commented Aug 16, 2018 •
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I'm also a fan of discourse. The URSSI has one if anyone wants to take a look: https://discuss.urssi.us

It's not too difficult to set up, with e.g. digital ocean hosting: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-the-discourse-one-click-application-on-digitalocean

And it might make sense to get a non-gh-pages URL, and host both the website and a forum there.

But there are still time and financial costs to setting up and maintaining something like that.

@rowlandm
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rowlandm commented Aug 16, 2018 via email

@jni
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jni commented Aug 16, 2018 •
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  • Is there free hosting for Discourse?

Not that I'm aware of. But a self-maintained instance is free.

  • If you set it up but have to leave the RSE community - who will
    maintain it?

As you mentioned, we would need buy in from more than just me for this question to have a satisfactory answer, but it's looking promising based on this thread.

  • Who will look after the backups and maintain the security patches?

I haven't looked into this in detail, but both things appear to be single-click features of the discourse software.

  • Will we migrate the old messages from the Google Groups?

Dunno. Only very few people have seen those messages though... ;) More seriously, again, I haven't looked into this in detail but a quick web search shows many promising avenues to do this.

@jni
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jni commented Aug 16, 2018

I also want to clarify that I may sound like I'm pushing super hard for Discourse. I'm not, it's a gentle suggestion, I'm a newcomer to this community and more established members should weigh the pros and cons. The only thing I'm pushing hard for is a publicly-visible, easy-to-join forum.

@rowlandm
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rowlandm commented Aug 16, 2018 via email

@rowlandm
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rowlandm commented Nov 4, 2018

HI @jni - could you also potentially look at the implications of using Discourse vs opening the Google groups?

Would that be possible?

@jni
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jni commented Nov 5, 2018

@rowlandm what do you mean exactly? Here are the pros/cons of Google vs Discourse as I see them.

  • Opening Google is pretty much instantaneous and effortless, while setting up Discourse will probably require at least 1 day of effort by someone, plus some ongoing maintenance
  • Discourse will also require hosting, which means at a minimum periodically justifying our existence to NeCTAR. Should be fine I think.
  • Discourse is a more modern interface (I like it better at least), fully open source, which gives us more control both now and in the future.

In the short term I can't do the Discourse setup but around end November I should be able to spend a day on it if we get a consensus that that's what we want.

@rowlandm
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rowlandm commented Nov 8, 2018

OK - Thanks.

I think we should open Google for now, less work. As Kerri mentioned earlier, we do need to be mindful of privacy concerns.

Maybe @mingfangwu @manodeep we should email this to the overall group and set a date for changeover, with any dissenting voices to pipe up any concerns they may have as individuals?

@rowlandm
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I just saw this....

https://github.com/discourse/discourse_docker

@rowlandm rowlandm closed this as completed May 1, 2019
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@rowlandm @jni @atruskie @manodeep @goldingn